Qwest (now Centurylink) Online Order Flow, 2005

Nicole contracted to work on a team where she was one of two Information Architects working to ideate, test, and iterate on a solution to make the online ordering flow for Qwest.com more transparent and intuitive. She worked with a formal Human Factors lab with recruited subjects, and observed and analyzed their behavior to apply to optimization of the user flows inherent in the interface for each persona.

Our thoughts

It was difficult to convey to users how to order abstract products and services (can't just put them in a cart and check out, you had to configure, and many features conflicted with each other). The users taught me so much about not relying just on my own intuition regarding user behavior, but that I needed actual feedback from actual users. Some things I thought were simple the users did not get and vice versa. It was a fun challenge!